The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Poetry in Motion

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2022-07-29

So much cringe here today. Obviously, the first submission below just reeks of professional sycophantry on so many levels. I can't decide which is more offensive, the barefoot butcher or the grotesque attempt to humanize a vogon. To take the edge off, I'll start you out with a very old shaggy dog punchline. The actual setup for this groaner is pretty horrible, though someone on the internet has dutifully compiled the definitive collection of all known variants. Sparing you that misery, I'll cut straight to the chase: Rudolf the Red knows rain, dear. Now you can decide which gag is more worthy: that, or this.

My English vocabulary cannot convey the complexity of my feelings about Beatrix W. who shared a monstrosity, reporting innocently "I was just looking for a book about AppleScript by a Japanese author." Is there a Japanese word for "thank you for this gift but never do it again?"

17 comments - Last comment @ 2022-09-16

Untimely Ripp'd

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2022-07-22

This week we bring you a whole set of submissions that prove, once again, that web programmers just can't keep track of time. But first, a sop with a regular. Is a flying NaN safer than a Camel? I wouldn't recommend making either a habit.

Friend Argle B.is right, submissions to Error'd from actual desktop applications are rare. He explanes "I routinely expect this from websites. I did NOT expect to find it in MSFS. It came up when I deleted all the digits." Good for you, Mr. B. I can't type a lick without digits.

13 comments - Last comment @ 2022-07-31

Shift-Meta-Errord

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2022-07-15

The submissions this week seemed to have coincidentally developed a theme of self-reference. You tell me.

First, persistent Caleb S. tried over and over again to submit this same item for our consideration. He called it a "space-enfolding bus" and said that "There's apparently more space in this Afternoon Tea bus than meets the eye -- you can book seats for 500 adults and 500 children." Alas, his submission came without an image, so we asked for a do-over. Dutifully done, Caleb's second and third attempts both reported "Please use the comments from when I tried to submit this without an image." With that behind us, here is the image from the final attempt.

24 comments - Last comment @ 2022-08-23

Smörgåsbord

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2022-07-08

This week we have a veritable grab-bag of all the most common sorts of website errors: the NaN, the null, the undefined, the bad text substitution and the wonky date math. Honestly, they're getting tedious. Somebody should build a tool to help developers scrub their code of impurities and dross. They could call it something catchy like, I dunno, purifier or lintbrush.

Timely Todd R. tells us "I left a window open in Workday for too long, and like a lot of other apps it threatened to log me out. I just wish I knew when that was..."

12 comments - Last comment @ 2022-07-11

Anabelly

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2022-07-01

Knock knock.

Matthew shared a classic catch-22 that didn't catch any, explaining "Redditstatus.com is in the middle of a Reddit outage (actually, after the outage has been "restored" and we are "monitoring the situation"). The whole point of hosting a status page separately is so that it does not share common failure mechanism with the site being monitored!"

19 comments - Last comment @ 2022-07-31